dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle's blog

Downtown Eugene’s resurgence has been defying gravity since the Great Recession began in 2008, but it’s showing no signs of leveling off. Its ascent will hit new peaks this summer, and you can be a part of it.

In 2007, I supported the KWG Development mega-project that would have remade downtown Eugene with a sprawling “lifestyle mall” built by out-of-towners with deep pockets and high hopes. Their project promised us two things for downtown that I doubted we could get any other way: coherence and movies.

Those who opposed that project preferred a more organic approach — rehabbing some of downtown’s anchor buildings, filling them with local businesses, taking a slower pace but sending roots down deeper. I was wrong — twice.

What’s emerging in our downtown is everything that was promised. It has grown in fits and starts, but naturally. It reflects and rewards local ambitions. Somehow the various projects are forming a single and strong vibe.

Instead of the single huge project, Eugene has strung together dozens of smaller successes — spreading the risk, the credit, and the satisfaction widely. Downtown’s renaissance has not been a spectator sport.

By the end of this month, the center of downtown also will have its own movie theater again. Downtown instantly will become attractive to a large swath of entertainment consumers. Nothing else changes so often, appeals so broadly, and costs so little.

Over a year ago, downtown developers Steve Master and Tim Weiskind were trolling for tenants to fill their rehabilitated Taco Time building. Eugene’s Community Development Manager Mike Sullivan told them that Bijou Art Cinemas was looking to expand into downtown. Master cold-called the Bijou. This week they hung the sign for Bijou Metro at 43 W. Broadway.

Bijou Metro will have two theaters that seat 35 each, plus two screening rooms that seat about half as many. They hope to open next weekend, after a sneak preview for their key supporters. You could be among them.

I sat this week with co-owner Edward Schiessl over a cup of caffeine at The Barn Light cafe. Caffeine clearly has become his friend over the past few months.

“This was originally a $70 thousand project,” he sipped with almost eery nonchalance, “but it’s grown into more than $300 thousand.” Schiessl grew up in Eugene, studied film in Portland, and has a feature film of his own in production limbo. He and his three working partners who have tapped their own credit lines to save and grow the Bijou.

Although they will retain all their projectors for archive and specialty films, the industry is rapidly converting to digital presentation technology. That conversion was not in their project budget. So they turned to a crowd-funding website, kickstarter.com. In less than four weeks, they’ve raised more than $39 thousand from friends, family and fans who want to help.

The kickstarter campaign will close in five days. Bijou Metro is offering swag and a sneak preview for those who give just a little. Anyone who gives a lot could see their name over one of the screening rooms. In between are yearlong passes, private screenings, and the opportunity to curate your own series of four movie titles.

“People have responded very positively,” Schiessl told me. “We’re not a charity, so this is a little different. Most people are doing it because they want movie passes. So it’s really just another debt for us. We’re borrowing from our own customers.”

Once the digital conversion is paid for, next on the Bijou’s wish list are new screens for the 13th Avenue theaters. “They took a lot of abuse during all those midnight showings of ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’,” Schiessl confided, without saying too much.

They’re also considering new rocking theater seats. “Whatever money we raise will go into enhancing the moviegoing experience,” Schiessl said.

Have the partners begun thinking yet about paying off their personal credit lines? Nope.

Schiessl barely answered the question. “We all love movies. We all love the Bijou. If we have enough to eat and can pay the rent, that’ll keep us happy.”

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) owns a small advertising agency, servicing local and civic-minded businesses, including the Bijou. He blogs occasionally.

Eight times a year since 1912, a few dozen of the community’s business and civic leaders have met with a few dozen leaders from campus for dinner and conversation, followed by the presentation of a research paper prepared for the club by one of its members.

The Round Table Club of Eugene recently celebrated its 100th birthday. A handful of us took on the project of assembling a history of the first century of Eugene’s oldest town-gown organization. Each of us was assigned a decade to research and summarize.

My assignment was the 1980s, which was when the club first began discussing the admission of women. Once women were admitted into membership, some very prominent men resigned in protest.

I tracked down retired architect Bill Neel on his ranch south of town to ask him what he thought was most remarkable about that decade, since he had been president during those discussions.

I thought I knew what I was going to hear. I was wrong.

“I can’t tell you the exact year when it happened, but I have no doubt about one of the things that changed the club significantly,” Neel told me. “Name tags.”

Say what? For at least 25 years, the club has provided name tags for its members, neatly laid out on a table as you enter. Blank paper name tags and a pen are provided for guests.

“When I first joined the club, the city was smaller. So was the university, of course. And yet, the club was more exclusive. Everybody knew who you were,” Neel recounted. “[Eminent law professor] Orlando Hollis expressed it best when he said if you were qualified for membership in Round Table, then you were well enough known not to need a name tag.”

We can debate whether the name tags caused or reflected a change, but the result is unmistakable.

Name tags lubricated the evenings together. Nobody had to ask to be reminded of anyone else’s name. But the larger result, as shrewdly identified by Neel, was less camaraderie where it really mattered — on the street corners, in the city’s restaurants, or from the Rolodexes of members’ offices. Members lost some of their ability to bring social connections to bear on the matters of civic and campus life.

Adding women changed the organization, but didn’t weaken it. Name tags weakened the organization for the sake of not changing it.

Sociologists and anthropologists have calculated the approximate number of names most of us can easily remember. Those who can expand that innate capacity beyond 500 or so often have become our leaders. Their increased capacity for connectedness gave them all the advantages that a larger social network provided. “Word of mouth” was all there was.

Then came literacy and then mass media. Pamphleteers could for the first time manufacture fame from something other than a person’s ability to make and maintain social connections. Fame brought power, but power slowly cleaved from competence. (Military and religious rulers enjoyed outsized power for centuries, but even they benefited from their ability to foster alliances and allegiance within their circles.)

And now we have social media, where we “follow” and “friend” people we’ve never met. These metaphors are now completely detached from their original meanings.

Relying on name tags at events is like watching “The Godfather” with subtitles. Marlon Brando mumbles on purpose, forcing you to listen harder. If understanding him became easy, you might think his character takes lightly what he’s saying. The struggle and the meaning are inseparable.

We’re better off admitting our embarrassment when we cannot remember somebody’s name. It might motivate us to pay more attention. A friend of mine believes we could better society profoundly by simply delaying the exchange of names until meaningful connections have been established.

I’ve never seen him do it, but he claims to have at least occasionally interrupted the usual flow of a party with, “Wait, wait! Don’t tell me your name yet. Give me a reason to care first.”

Name tags make us more comfortable, and less competent. But sooner or later — we should hope — the competence is what will matter most.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs

Our nation has proven that Rock, Paper, Scissors should and will be won by Paper. The Rock of military might and the Scissors of economic efficiency cannot compete with the Paper of enumerated rights contained in our United States Constitution. Even after 237 years, understanding and defending that Constitution remains vital. Oregon can be proud of its contribution this week.

Oregon’s Classroom Law Project has been providing curriculum and competition for high school students since 1983. This week, all 50 states sent their best teams to Washington, DC to compete in “We The People.” The program tests students’ understanding of our Constitution’s roots, history, and modern applications.

Grant High School in Portland won this year’s nationwide competition. Last year’s winner was Lincoln High School, just four miles west of Grant.

South Eugene High School teacher Stan Paulic has taken two teams to the state competition. “During my first year at South, CLP sent me to the nationals in D.C. as an observer teacher. I got to see the best in action and found the whole event quite inspirational.” In a follow-up conversation, Paulic used the word “thrilling” three times.

Students are drilled by judges, attorneys, and professors in a setting that resembles a Congressional hearing. In less than 15 minutes, they must cite case law, historical precedent, and modern repercussions of several Constitutional tenets.

Here’s a sample question: Due process of law is often referred to as the “bedrock of civil liberty.” What are the essential requirements of due process included in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and in what ways, if any, do they constitute the “bedrock of civil liberty?”

(Let’s pause for a moment here and be astounded — and deeply grateful — that there are high schoolers wrestling with questions like this one.)

Consider the contrasts.

Last week the United States Senate admitted that a five-year program to end the government’s strategic helium reserve would miss its implementation deadline — for the third time. Senators agreed to prolong the program, but Oregon Senator Ron Wyden pledged, “I intend to watchdog this very carefully.”

Two days later, three high-schoolers from a little school near St. Louis argued whether minority rights are helped or hindered by lobbyists. “Think about the corn growers — there are only 350,000 of them and … they practically run America,” claimed Kaylie Duke.

In a rare example of bipartisanship, Congress debated and passed legislation allowing a commemorative coin marking the Baseball Hall of Fame’s 75th anniversary to be a few thousandths of an inch smaller than the original law required. The amendment was two sentences long, but it saved the U.S. Mint from having to purchase new equipment to accommodate the law’s original mandate for size and shape.

Students debated whether drone warfare represents an unconstitutional expansion of executive power, why Congress has all but abdicated its constitutional authority to declare war, and which ideals articulated in our Bill of Rights drew inspiration from the Magna Carta.

Across the street, the United States Congress had just completed a hurried fix for the Federal Aviation Authority’s “across the board cuts” required by the so-called sequester law. Was it any coincidence that the law’s amendment, designed to halt flight delays, was drafted and then signed into law just hours before our nation’s lawmakers were high-tailing it to the airport for this week’s recess?

Who was learning to win at Rock, Paper, Scissors and who was counting the minutes until recess? Close your eyes and tell me you can guess which group is not a bunch of petulant teenagers.

Also consider this. The sequester was designed to be so ugly and inconvenient that it would force Congress to devise a more sensible budget solution. For once in Washington, doing nothing would not be the most attractive option. Not only did lawmakers still choose to do nothing, their piecemeal fix for a single agency demonstrated that they cannot even do nothing well.

If we could hand over the government to these high schoolers right now, we might see acne medicine subsidies immediately added to the Affordable Care Act, but I cannot believe we wouldn’t be better off.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs

Eugene city staff has been guiding a public process for considering possible changes for a short stretch of Willamette Street in south Eugene. Some want to keep the current configuration of two lanes in both directions. Others believe a better design would be a single lane in each direction, plus a left-turn lane in the middle, making room for wider sidewalks or bike lanes.

The final decision on the matter will be made by the Eugene City Council. They would do well to invite a recent alumnus to give them his perspective. Pat Farr is now a Lane County Commissioner, but he knows something surprising about traffic flow.

Ask yourself this question: “Who offers the better check-out experience: Safeway or Jerry’s?”

The single line check-out system at Jerry’s was recognized decades ago as one of that year’s best innovations for the industry. Farr was a manager at Jerry’s when the idea was hatched.

“I remember the day when Jerry Orem told me about it,” Lane County Commissioner Pat Farr recalled. “It was in 1981. Jerry had just returned from the Westside Post Office. He saw it there and asked me to help him bring it here.”

Farr took his staff to that post office. Then they improved the concept. They skewed the registers, so each clerk could look directly at the next person in line. They removed the continuous counter and trained cashiers to step toward the next customer to beckon them. If Wal-Mart’s greeters added a personal touch to the beginning of a shopper’s experience, cashiers at Jerry’s did the same for the end.

“You have to understand what it was like for Jerry,” Farr continued. “His office looked out at the cashiers. He could see how customers would get exasperated when the line they chose was too slow. Sometimes, they would give up — putting their items on a shelf and leaving the store. Jerry couldn’t bear that sight.”

Orem and Farr cured their customers of what grocery stores call “line envy.” Customers unconsciously profile those ahead of them, trying to guess which line will go fastest. When they guess wrong, they get upset. They want to blame those in charge for not opening more lanes — I mean, lines.

“Lane envy” is exactly the same dynamic, only with several tons of metal, glass and plastic moving at 30 miles per hour.

Here’s where the Jerry’s innovation becomes relevant. The amount of time it takes all customers to check out has not been reduced, but the pain people feel has. Farr remembers that customers at first didn’t like one long line, but once they tried it, they preferred it. “If you’re stopped, that’s bad! But any movement in the line makes it OK.”

Getting stuck behind somebody waiting to turn left is worse than being behind a customer paying with an out-of-state check, fumbling for their ID, or juggling a tired child. It’s worse because windshields lessen empathy. We’re staring at a bumper, feeling powerless.

A three-lane configuration for Willamette Street may increase the average travel time by a few seconds, but it also increases the reliability of that travel time.

Removing those vehicles waiting to turn left eliminates most of the “luck” we currently rely on when we navigate Willamette Street. Bad luck is experienced as stress, and that stress is not divided equally among the drivers affected.

One person running errands has a different stress level than the person trying not to be late to work for the third time this week. And neither is the same as somebody running late to catch a flight from Eugene Airport.

Researchers at the Texas Transportation Institute have defined this variable, giving traffic planners a new tool when combatting congestion. They call it the Time Planning Index. It doesn’t measure congestion itself. It measures the unreliability of trips in congested areas, because that’s where the pain occurs.

In other words, traffic engineers are learning just now how to improve the driving experience in the same way that Jerry Orem improved his customers’ experience in 1981.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs.

Monday is Earth Day. My first visit to Oregon gave me my most intimate encounter with the earth. One May night in 1979, I experienced how cradled we are in this world.

I came to Oregon that spring to read long books and hike long trails. If you’ve ever tried to make your way through an unfamiliar Russian novel, you know how “wilderness experience” applies to both. We would read challenging literature, and just when we wanted to give up understanding, we students and our three professors would lace up our boots and head into the wilderness.

Our longest hike was a three-day trek into the Three Sisters Wilderness Area. By the second day, we were as far from civilization as most of us suburban kids had ever been.

Midday, I left our base camp for what I thought would be a three-hour hike, following a river to a waterfall and back. My daypack had an extra pair of socks, my rain poncho, and a carrot. In my pocket, I had my compass and a map.

I got lost. I was counting on the river to guide me, but the brush along the water was too thick. I hiked higher up, where the scrub thinned, keeping the sound of running water on my left. I knew when the river forked, I would be near the falls and then it would be time to turn back.

I missed the fork in the river. I also missed dinner, and I was beginning to lose daylight. The terrain was taking me up. I could read my compass but the map no longer made any sense. I began calling for help, four times from each spot, once in each direction.

Snowy patches reflected enough light to keep me going, but soon I couldn’t tell if the dark splotches ahead were ground or water. I had no flashlight or matches. Wet boots would be asking for frostbite. So I stopped and looked for a place to rest until daylight returned.

I found a fallen tree, half hollowed, laying between two saplings. What remained of the large tree was shaped like a cradle. Its center was filled with sawdust softness. There were no bugs. For the next few hours, that was home.

I loosened my boots. I stretched the poncho over me, tucked under my head and pinched against the saplings with my knees. The carrot on my chest worked like a center tent pole.

I cannot describe the mixture of fear and comfort I felt in that tree trunk.

I didn’t dare sleep. Slowing metabolism invites frostbite. So I played a game to stay awake. I listed everything I was thankful for that started with A, then B, then C.

I was on F when I heard what sounded like footsteps, very nearby. The harder I listened, the less I understood. Step, step. If the scrunching sound was a person, I should make some noise. Step, step. If it was an animal, I shouldn’t. Step, step. But the animal could probably smell me, so why not take the chance? Step, step. Unless that might frighten it. Then scrunching sound stopped.

I remained perfectly still, listening. What I heard was perfect silence.

Slowly I began to relax and returned to my alphabet of gratitude. On H, the footsteps returned. I stopped to listen. The footsteps stopped too. It happened again at J or K, or possibly both.

I wondered how it knew what I was feeling. Comfort brought footsteps. Fear brought silence.

Then I noticed my carrot had slipped, and it all made sense. The scrunching sound was made by my eye lashes brushing against my poncho. As I relaxed into my list of thankfulness, my eyes opened and closed — “step, step.” Then fear — no motion, no sound.

I smiled, then laughed. I lifted the poncho to see light on the horizon. I had made it through the night, with over half the alphabet to spare.

I retraced my steps and made it back to base camp before others awoke. I probably compared my night to some Russian novel over the breakfast campfire. I wish I had looked back to see that cradle one more time.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs

People will tell you the upcoming vote on Eugene’s city services fee amounts to a referendum on trust. That part is true. They claim if the fee is rejected, the vote will reflect that Eugene voters don’t trust their government. Not necessarily. It could be worse than that.

Domestic violence counselors deal with “battered person syndrome.” We might be suffering from something similar. Call it “battered city syndrome.”

Urban planners could take a page from the medical profession’s International Classification of Diseases. Many of the symptoms of the disease will look familiar. It’s a variant of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The psyche’s coping mechanisms adapt to stress and deprivation so well that a removal of those discomforts can itself become uncomfortable. The disease shows up first as dis-ease.

Battered spouses too often stay in unhealthy marriages because any unknown compares unfavorably with continued deprivation. Without a foundation of self-worth and optimism, familiarity trumps relief — sometimes with tragic consequences. When others attempt to help them exit the unhealthy environment, the outsiders are viewed with suspicion or even rage.

Clinicians call this symptom learned helplessness. Successful coping strategies can leave us unable to help ourselves or accept help from others. Once your deprivation merges with your concept of normal, you feel trapped but resigned. You “stay with the devil you know.”

Our devil of deprivation came in 1982, when our local economy crashed. It’s never fully recovered. But we’ve adapted. We’ve coped. We’ve survived.

We conserve. We do without. We share. We scour Eugene Weekly for free entertainment events. We assume we’re always at the bottom of any “sliding scale.” It’s woven now into our way of life. It’s mostly good to be not so grand.

But things are changing for Eugene.

Streets are getting repaired faster than we were promised. City staff is leaner, but more productive. The pits are filled. City Hall will be rebuilt with money on hand. Downtown is thriving. Developers are calling from Chicago and Birmingham. Yesterday we learned that we’ve snagged the Olympic Trials again for 2016. We’re everybody’s latest darling — luring entrepreneurs from Portland, landing direct flights to Los Angeles, earning plaudits from perfect strangers.

But who do we see in the mirror? Is this really us? How do we fit into the hope that seems suddenly surrounding us? We’re survivors, but can we welcome strivers? Can we become thrivers? Can we be as good stewards of our recent successes as we were during our decades of scarcity?

These are just a few questions we’ll be answering with our vote on the city services fee. All the questions come down to this. Do we want to build on our recent successes, or would we prefer to go backwards — to a place that is less comfortable but more familiar?

If up to ten dollars a month is what’s being asked of us, can we manage that? As taxes go, it’s regressive, as any flat fee is. The nickel charge for paper grocery bags is regressive too. But both fees are modest for most of us. Will the fee allow us to grow our better side, or would we prefer to feed our fears?

Some will feel the monthly fee more like a punch than a pinch. Voting against the fee might not be the most empathetic response. Can we find personal ways to help them? How can we all benefit from the good things that are happening?

Before voting against the city services fee, please ask yourself two more questions: Is it government I don’t trust? Or am I finding it difficult to trust myself? It’s cold comfort that the symptom is included in your doctor’s ICD index of treatable diseases, but here’s something better.

It’s also found in the annals of blues music. Nancy Sinatra reworked a phrase made famous in 1928 by country bluesman Furry Lewis:

I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me.
I pushed him off the ladder of success,
But down here on the bottom I get to rest.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs

I wrote an essay for this space five years ago regarding gay marriage, asking Oregon to extend domestic partnerships to heterosexual couples. I argued that the stigma of “separate but equal” was real and that the state could end its contribution cleanly. I wrote, “As long as the domestic partnership license is ‘in all ways legally equivalent’ to marriage, then the state’s needs are met. Government can step aside and let the churches, synagogues, and mosques sort out who can be married and who can’t.”

Much has changed in five years.

Gay marriage is now allowed in nine states. Public opinion points toward increasing acceptance. TIME Magazine’s cover this week displayed two men close up for a kiss, with a headline that claims the battle is already won. The Supreme Court literally held court on the topic last week. Attitudes are shifting quickly and our language is not quite keeping up, making the judges’ work extremely difficult.

Society is held together by laws, but laws rely on language. In the span of two generations, the word “gay” has shifted from favorable (meaning happy) to unfavorable (homosexual) to neutral (homosexual).

While gay pride parades were deliberately remaking the word “gay,” we failed to notice that “marriage” transforming itself in equally radical ways.

When America’s economy was mostly agrarian, marriage conveyed property. Property and economic security were inseparable. Every partner was a business partner. Divorce was rare, at least in the working classes, because the specter of destitution was real.

Families worked their land for sustenance. Children were raised to provide more hands. Families were large out of economic necessity. Children — the ones who survived — cared for their family’s elders. When the children were unwilling or unable to care for the exiting generation, outcomes sometimes became gruesome.

After the Great Depression, our nation mobilized its resources to form a bulwark against the horror of elders literally starving to death. President Franklin Roosevelt promised social security to America. We agreed, and those two words became capitalized. With it, the nation began collectivizing elder care.

A quarter century later, Medicare completed the pact. These two changes in society completely reinvented marriage in less than a generation. It’s no longer a societal pact that sanctions procreation, puts children to work on the family farm, shares in the breadwinner’s company pension, or draws on progeny’s resources as life nears its end.

Our parents or grandparents knew for themselves and counseled those who would listen that marriage was meant to keep you safe — from exhaustion, starvation or disrepute.

Industrialization ended exhaustion. Social Security ended starvation. Disrepute still remains in some circles, but not for much longer.

The state’s interest in marriage was clear when it was the mechanism used to convey property, wealth and security. It’s difficult to grasp that only a little more than a century ago, children and wives were considered property themselves! Today, property is controlled or conveyed in other ways. Marriage often has nothing to do with it.

What had been an institution promoting economic stability has become something else altogether. It’s taken another generation to begin to say what marriage is becoming.

We were raised in households where marriage was considered the most reliable instrument for economic security. Our grandparents weathered hard times in their marriages by silently reminding themselves, “I’m not happy, but at least I’m not hungry.” When we eliminated the second half of that sentence, marriage lost its historical imperative.

Is it any wonder that divorce is so common? The ground beneath us began shifting in the 1960s, but nobody told us. Marriage was seen as important enough that it should be preserved and promoted, but not for its original reasons. “Till death do us part” became “until further notice.”

Fidelity hasn’t changed — marriage has.

Right or wrong, it’s now seen as a reliable vehicle to achieve personal happiness and fulfillment. Divorce rates cause some to question that perception, but we’re in a cultural maelstrom. It’s too soon to know what new social good marriage might help promote.

It’s not too soon to say that homosexuals have every right to share that hope with conventional couples.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard.

Fifth Friday footnotes, follow-ups and far-flung fripperies:

• Did our Good Friday holiday tradition develop our appetite for three-day weekends?

• Speaking of sacrificial lambs, the U.S. Postal Service could improve their austerity plan by curtailing service on Wednesdays instead of Saturdays. Americans would embrace Hump Day as midweek’s almost-holiday, nobody would go 72 hours without mail service, Saturday errand lists wouldn’t change, and weekend volume from Netflix would continue.

• Memo to Congress: When the Post Office tells you you’re moving too slowly, something’s wrong.

• Too many people need more comfort than comfort food can provide.

• Knowing the answer is seldom a substitute for asking the question.

• When did piety gain its ism?

• How did sneakers become a consumable? Have you ever tried to eat a shoe?

• Here’s a simple solution to help along the gun control debate. Give every registered gun owner a 100 percent tax credit for gun lock purchases and a 50 percent tax credit for a gun safe purchase. Police departments should give away gun locks the way Planned Parenthood distributes condoms.

• Some days I’m not so much accomplishing tasks as outlasting their need to be done.

• Accept this truth. After you’ve been told no, you’re exactly as far from getting your request as you were before you asked.

• I’m sure somebody benefits more than me from downtown Eugene’s free two-hour parking, but I haven’t met that person yet.

• People who grocery shop early in the day are happier than the rest of us. Their cupboard is never bare, not even for a few afternoon hours. They’re also thinner.

• If glass is technically considered a liquid, I say flour should be technically considered a gas.

• I’m slowly learning to look inside myself and replace triggers and switches with levers and dials. I react less and regulate more.

• If God intended more people to go to church, he wouldn’t have made the Sunday newspaper so large.

• We live our lives so distractedly now that when somebody gives us their undivided attention, we feel uncomfortable. And yet we still crave it.

• You can tell how old somebody feels by how many synonyms they use for “hurt.”

• I don’t think it’s my imagination that commercial pilots have stopped telling us when to look out the window to see the sights below. Now we fly like sullen tweens, lost in our book or game or thoughts, not to be disrupted. Are we no longer in awe, or have airlines determined that any sight viewable from only one side will just make the other side resentful?

• If you can’t be on time, be worth the wait.

• Did you know that Rep. Peter DeFazio has more seniority in the U.S. House of Representatives than all but 21 of his 434 colleagues?

• Be conservative with calculations, but liberal with condiments.

• Meaning grows easily when we hold it lightly. It becomes static when it feels possessed.

• Just once I’d like to run out of chips and salsa at the same time. Just once.

• I feel a vague discomfort when my modern devices reset themselves for Daylight Saving Time without my assistance, permission, or knowledge.

• Upon reflection, the wondrous innovation that accompanies the diagnosis of a terminal illness — “teaching a carton of milk to read its own expiration date” — has a sad progenitor: capital punishment. Do hospice workers pull shifts on death row? If not, they should.

• Some of us work hard only because we don’t wait well.

• How have pocket knives suddenly become allowable to carry on planes? Have all flight attendants completed secret Ninja training? Or was the restriction silly from the start?

• The trick is to feel fear before choosing whether or not to obey it.

• I admit that I get H-1B guest worker visas and H2N3 bird flu confused. Maybe I’m not the only one. Admitting more high-tech engineers from foreign countries won’t make us sick.

• I feel better when I know an avocado is ripening nearby.

• When you’re inside a bubble, everything goes in circles.

• I don’t dress for success. If people are noticing my clothing, I haven’t succeeded yet.

• We will rue the day when we begin ruing anything else.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs.

Local economist Ed Whitelaw and two of his cohorts at ECONorthwest (Philip Taylor and Bryce Ward) have unearthed an amazing and important statistic about Lane County’s economic landscape. In an essay published in last Sunday’s Commentary section, they showed Eugene-Springfield professional workers work fewer hours than their colleagues in almost any other metropolitan area nationwide.

Historical records show that this trend has been constant for more than a generation. When coupled with our lower average wage, that group’s wealth lags far behind most other metropolitan markets.

Whitelaw is an economist, not an anthropologist. I am neither, so I can pretend to be both and offer a possible explanation.

Normal becomes whatever we all agree is normal.

For example, my neighbor Bob recently was complaining at a neighborhood gathering about his morning commute from south Eugene to downtown. Traffic is an easy topic for commiseration, but Bob wasn’t getting much traction. While he spun his conversational wheels, I counted noses. There were 17 of us seated on assorted lawn chairs that Sunday evening. “Bob?” I asked, “Do you realize you’re the only one here who reports to a boss in an office every day?”

We all laughed as others checked my work. Three consultants, six self-employed, four students, one telecommuter, two semi-retired, and Bob. My neighborhood is not a scientific sample, but that’s not my point.

For a while, none of us noticed that Bob’s 9-to-5 is not our commonality. More importantly, when we did notice, nothing seemed wrong — except possibly to Bob.

University of Oregon professors have long understood they earn less than their colleagues at other universities. The gap has been sardonically embraced with the phrase, “We get paid in scenery.” Along with trees and mountains and plenty of water, that scenery includes self-employed, underemployed, and just-barely-employed — without shame.

In most other places I’ve lived, anyone not working 40 hours a week had either a secret disability or a disabling secret. If your work week wasn’t like Bob’s, you weren’t normal. Eugene has accepted work as necessary but not central to its identity.

Most Americans live to work. Eugeneans work to live.

Eugene’s lifestyle can evoke a culture shock. University of Oregon Journalism Professor Ed Madison came here from a large city. He once remarked to me, “People here sure love their scarcity.”

Put another way, people here have been getting by for so long, it’s all they know. We make and do less, so we make do more.

Let’s return to some economic numbers. National economists have marveled that housing starts are up 27.7 percent this year, and yet construction jobs are up only 2.9 percent. They attribute this to what’s called “labor hoarding.” Rather than lose good workers during slow periods, employers keep them on the payroll, often with reduced hours, even if there isn’t enough work to keep them busy.

Labor hoarding has become part of our way of life. Employers keep more workers than they need. Workers accept fewer hours than they’d like. It’s a vital part of our scenery.

I’ve asked people about this for years. Some businessmen tell me the Vietnam War protests of the 1970s convinced local economic leaders to keep a low profile. “Students took over the city’s culture,” one business titan told me, “and they never gave it back.”

Assigning causality to a culture is risky business, because there’s never a single force that produces such a constellation of consequences. But let me suggest one anyway.

Whitelaw’s essay mentioned the debilitating effect of alcohol, but I’m interested in another inebriant. Marijuana.

It’s not much debated whether people mellow under the chemical influence of THC. And it’s certainly not debatable that its use is more accepted here than in most other places. What happens next is what intrigues me.

Once it takes root, our altered state of normal continues without its original cause. We aren’t all high when we smile at strangers, invite a person with two items in the grocery line to move ahead of us, or pass a resolution when the board chairperson asks, “Everybody cool?” It’s just normal.

And normal looks like a contact high.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs.

Can we just say out loud that we’re done with surface parking lots? Envision Eugene envisions a Eugene where a dense core relieves pressure on its edges. The economics haven’t quite caught up with that aspiration, but we’re almost there. If we declare as a community that we will no longer support or subsidize surface parking lots in our city center, we’ll get there that much quicker.

We’re already close. Student housing projects in downtown and the South University neighborhoods are building parking into their structures because there’s more money to be made from the land without paving and striping it. Developers applying for the city’s Multi Unit Property Tax Exemption (MUPTE) have been adding courtyards and bike paths and greenery instead of asphalt.

Former Eugene Mayor Brian Obie’s ambitious proposal for a two block swath along Sixth Avenue could represent our tipping point. He envisions a movie theater, hotel, grocery store and almost 200 units of housing. His plan sops up surface parking for higher uses. He will replace the revenue Lane County has been receiving from those parking lots, even during construction. The new hotel would eliminate another parking lot — his own at 5th Street Public Market.

Parking lots are being eliminated from our downtown. That’s what we’ve wanted for decades. We built the Parcade and Overpark and other parking structures since, expecting the economics to catch up. It’s taken longer than we had hoped, but it’s finally happening.

Just a couple of years ago, urban planners and forward thinkers decried the site plan designed for the new home of Oregon Research Institute. The building was handsome enough and was being built to very modern economic and environmental standards, but it’s surrounded by a sea of surface parking.

ORI’s site was controlled by the University of Oregon as part of its Riverfront Research Park, so Eugene had less influence of how that land was to be used than we may have wished. Keeping those high-wage jobs near the downtown core was worth some compromises, and we did manage to nudge them away from the river. Whatever leverage we had was used up before the asphalt was ordered.

But that was then and this is now.

Northwest Community Credit Union recently purchased two acres beside the Wayne L. Morse United States Courthouse from the city of Eugene. They plan to build their new corporate headquarters there. Those are just the sorts of jobs we want near downtown. We want workers who walk to restaurants and gift shops. They will in turn attract other downtown businesses.

We should welcome and help them, but less so their cars.

The credit union has received permission to add drive-through windows for their customers. The Eugene City Council gave them the zoning change they requested last month. They owe us a favor.

NWCU’s building program includes lots of surface parking. Eugene and the credit union should figure out a better way to handle parking. MUPTE applicants have found ways to add structured parking to the plans. Selling a valuable parcel of downtown land to a tax-exempt organization is similar to the MUPTE tax break, except it goes on forever.

NWCU has been forthright about its need to control the extra acreage for their future expansion. A surface parking lot amounts to a de facto land bank. The credit union bought room for future expansion at today’s prices.

That’s good investment planning on their part, but it’s our future too. We can design a land bank for the credit union that works for them in the future and for us in the meantime.

Why not continue the urban farming that’s been there for two years? As housing units come on line, that use will slowly become less ironic. People attracted to living downtown soon will be asking for a dog park.

Credit unions help their customers plan for the future. A huge parking lot around NWCU’s headquarters will not pay all of us the best dividend. Let’s not miss this moment to declare that our future is finally in sight.

Asphalt is so last week.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs.